In a wireless communication system, a major design challenge is to maximize system capacity and performance. One such communication design known in the art is Multiple-Input/Multiple Output (MIMO), and is a means of transmitting multiple data streams on the same time-frequency channel to a single receiver. The MIMO strategy involves deploying multiple antennas on both the transmitter and the receiver.
In environments having rich multipath scattering, large increases in capacity can be achieved through the use of MIMO and appropriate transmit and receive signal processing techniques. It is well known that MIMO wireless channels have significantly higher capacities than single-input single-output wireless communication channels, which has motivated the design of wireless communication systems with multiple antennas. Current system algorithms designed to achieve high capacity include spatial multiplexing, space-time coding and adaptive modulation.
These MIMO systems include the various BLAST (Bell-labs LAyered Space-Time) type techniques proposed by Lucent as a subset. The BLAST type techniques however, do not use the channel knowledge at the transmitter and thus are sub-optimal.
For MIMO systems, the maximum theoretical system capacity can be achieved using transmit and receive weights based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) combined with a water-pouring (optimally assigning power to the individual data streams) strategy for determining the optimal data rates and power distribution. This strategy for maximizing capacity must adaptively control not only the number of independent data streams to be formed but also the choice of modulation and coding to be used on each stream. However, even for full-rank channels (as are known in the art), there are cases where a fixed number of data streams having the same modulation type is desirable, for example to avoid having to make a complex real-time decision on both the number of streams and the modulation/coding type on each stream. Consequently, using the SVD weights for a fixed number of equal-rate data streams is not the best option because fixing the modulation type will not take advantage of the unequal signal-to-noise ratios at the outputs of the receive array.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method and device for finding transmit and receive weights that are optimized for the use of equal-rate data streams. Further, it would be desirable that these weights have a lower Bit Error Rate (BER) than weights found using the SVD approach.